Free Thunder Run by David Zucchino Page A

and disoriented. The lieutenant looked at Couvertier. Blood was gushing from his face. His whole uniform was soaked in blood. Gruneisen looked again. It wasn’t blood—it was a greenish fluid. Then he realized: it was hydraulic fluid. The turret’s hydraulics system had exploded. Something had smacked into Couvertier’s face, breaking his nose and splattering him with blood, but otherwise he was fine. Everyone checked themselves for blood or wounds. They were bruised and disoriented. In the few seconds it took to regain their senses, they realized they were, remarkably, just fine.
    In the driver’s hole, Peterson still didn’t know what had happened. When the gun tube plowed into the abutment, the tank had rocked and shuddered, but somehow it had kept rolling. Peterson saw the turret spinning madly over his head and brought the tank to a hard stop. He wasn’t sure the crew in the turret was still alive.
    The voice of First Sergeant Jose Mercado came over the radio. He was in the personnel carrier behind them. “What the hell happened? You guys all right?”
    Gruneisen radioed back groggily, “Yeah, yeah, we’re okay.”
    Gruneisen popped the commander’s hatch and looked out. The pile of gear was gone. The impact had sent it flying. It was scattered all over the highway behind them—personal gear, radios, radio code boxes, manuals, rucksacks. He was preparing to climb out and retrieve it when he saw soldiers from the first sergeant’s track scramble out and scoop up what they could. They grabbed the sensitive items—the radio and code boxes—but they left the rucksacks. Diaz and Hernandez lost their clothes, their shower kits, letters from home, their CDs and CD players—everything.
    Diaz was in a state of disbelief. It was like watching a series of silly mishaps happen to someone in a movie. It was hard to believe that all this was really happening to them. First his tank burned up. Then they crashed into a bridge abutment and took a carnival ride. Now he had lost all his gear—and the crew had no idea which way to go. He was a forlorn figure down there in the turret, a dirty, weary, distressed tank commander without a tank.
    Gruneisen had Peterson get the tank rolling again. They had fallen farther behind, and now they had no main gun. The gun tube was useless, which meant that the coax—which was “slaved” to the main gun—was out of commission, too. Gruneisen knew they were at the spaghetti junction, where they was supposed to take a ramp to the airport highway. What he didn’t know is that at this very spot, Ball and the rest of the column had followed a ramp to the improvised U-turn and were now rolling westward on the airport highway. Gruneisen looked ahead, hoping to see the tail of the column. There was nothing.
    He radioed Captain Conroy, “Where’s the turn?”
    Conroy told the lieutenant that he had seen a burning motorcycle and a statue of Iraqi soldiers near the off-ramp he had taken to the U-turn. Gruneisen managed to find the proper off-ramp and was headed now toward the smashed guardrails that marked the U-turn. He couldn’t see anything that looked like a motorcycle or a statue. The tank rolled past the U-turn and headed northeast—toward Saddam Hussein’s palace complex in central Baghdad. A voice came over the radio: “Hey One One—where’d you go?”
    Gruneisen checked his grids and realized he had gone too far. They had to turn around right away. But there were bunkers and snipers on this roadway, too, and now the tank was under fire. Hernandez was back up on the M-240, spraying over the left side. Diaz was ripping open ammunition boxes and tossing belts of ammo up to Hernandez. Gruneisen was struggling with the .50-caliber. He couldn’t elevate properly because the elevation handle had snapped off. He wasn’t really hitting anybody, but at least he was able to keep